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Looking for a place to attend Christmas Mass, I went down to the Greek Orthodox Church and chatted with the Priest.

I was favorably impressed with everything, except that he does get information from MSNBC and thinks Bush lied about WMD to get us into Iraq.

On the plus side, he didn't get hostile when I ventured my opinion that Bush was set up by a cabal of Clintonoids within the CIA, and actually thought he was telling the truth.

Okay, that is it. I am not a Orthodoxie nor Catholicist, but they mess with Mt. Athos and I am likely to take up the Crusader Cross and go medieval on somebody! (Where did I put that broadsword?)

--The fathers of Esphigmenou struggle against the heresy of ecumenism which states that there is no one church which possesses the Truth.
--The Patriarch refuses to allay those concerns and refuses to engage in constructive dialogue with the monks. He has, however, demanded an apology in writing for questioning him.

Okay, what the heck is Patriarch Bart teaching here? Methinks the monks got a point. Doctrine is not something that one can back down on just so 'we can get along'. You do that and what you get is Rick Warren or Joel Ostein (search for them here if you haven't a clue.)

--It also seems to me that in terms of their beliefs, attitudes, and interpretations of past and present canonical law, these monks are little different from our own schismatic "traditionalists" who stand in judgment of the Church and of the Successor of St. Peter, they being the only ones in the right and everyone else, wrong, by their own fiat.

Nope. That is all wrong. Their are NO schismatics in the RCC. I read it here myself from good Catholics when they mention that the Prots have 450000 denominations and cannot agree on doctrine. That simply CANNOT happen with the RCC. (Just ribbing you guys! :o))

Merry Christmas to all those on that side of the Tiber.

(Does this mean I am the Etruscan King and you guys are Horatio? Defend honorable Rome! and all that...)

"these monks are little different from our own schismatic "traditionalists" who stand in judgment of the Church and of the Successor of St. Peter, they being the only ones in the right and everyone else, wrong, by their own fiat. "

I am so sick of that wrong-headed, wrong-hearted crap.

Maybe if we tell it as a fairy tale...

Once upon a time, there was a church that believed A, B, and C for 2000 years. Then, one day, a bunch of people said, "No, no, A, B, and C aren't right. You all have to start believing X, Y, and Z, which have always been associated with the deadly enemies of your church."

Some in the church were sheeple, and went along. A very few said, "No, you have no authority to substitute X, Y, and Z for A, B, and C."

The theological Stalinists then waxed wroth, and, arguing as leftists always do, tried to ignore the 2000 years of Church history and paint A, B, and C as nothing more than the opinions of the non-sheeple.

Where these "traditionalists" stood in judgment of the theological Stalinists for substituting their own whims for Church doctrine, the Stalinists calumniated them for "standing in judgment of the Church," a naked lie of the sort in which leftists habitually deal.

Where the non-sheeple compared the dictates of the theological Stalinists with the established doctrine of the Church and found the Stalinists in error, the Stalinists prattled of "their own fiat," to make it seem like it was only the dissenters arrayed against them and not all of Church teaching, doctrine, Tradition, revelation, and Scripture.

In other words, they reacted to dissent from theological Stalinism with the same dishonest ploys secular Stalinists use in the political sphere.

Satan has a particular, unmistakable stench. The liberal church in America reeks of it.